When All Is Ruin Once Again

At the beginning of the Anthropocene – an epoch defined as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on the natural world – a rural community carve out their lives while a motorway ploughs forth through the landscape. It goes no further than the town of Gort in the west of Ireland, halted by the dawn of a financial crisis.

In this poetic documentary from director Keith Walsh, who lives on the South Galway/Clare border where the documentary was made, a myriad of personalities weave an epic tapestry through the bog lands, farms, firesides, race tracks and hurling pitches of recession Ireland.

“We might all need to be remembered someday,” a storyteller by a lake defines the importance of folk tales living on in collective memory long after the death of the protagonist. It also attests to the impermanence of our existence; whatever we do, say or make during our lives, will eventually be forgotten, while nature will reclaim all evidence of our civilisations.

W.B. Yeats, while living in the same area, understood the futility of our quest to be remembered, when he wrote the lines pleading…